What did women ordained to the diaconate do during the celebration of Eucharist? What were they forbidden to do? Why? This article reviews papal edicts as well as local episcopal, synodal/conciliar, and canonical restrictions against women’s participation in the liturgy, the liturgical responsibilities of Western deacons, and concludes, noting contemporaneous discussion regarding women’s altar service. The analysis demonstrates that the liturgical tasks of women ordained as deacons were eventually forbidden all women, whose “impure” state required that they be kept distant from the sacred.

This article reviews Catholic theological conceptions of parenthood within magisterial documents since the late nineteenth century and contends that presumptions about parenthood tend to arise as reactions to Western cultural developments related to sex and gender. This reactionary trend creates instability in conceptions of parenthood and inhibits the ability of the institutional church to respond constructively to real challenges that face parents in the present. Pastoral concern for lived realities, as well as the responsibilities of Christian parents to socialize and evangelize children, tend to disrupt this trend, but more adequate theological attention to parenthood qua parenthood is still required.

There is a long-noted anthropological and methodological divide between Catholic social and sexual ethics. We argue in three cumulative sections that Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia moves towards an anthropological and methodological integration of Catholic social teaching and Catholic sexual teaching. First, we explore Amoris Laetitia’s anthropological integration of Catholic social and Catholic sexual teaching; second, we explore its methodological integration of Catholic social and sexual teaching; finally, we demonstrate how the anthropological and methodological insights of Amoris Laetitia might provide a more integrated and credible response to a contemporary ethical issue.

A question often posed to biblical scholars is how they can insist that God is merciful and trustworthy when in many Old Testament texts God is harsh and punitive. The article proposes to interpret such hard texts by examining the biblical scribes’ habits of composition—what they noticed, how they saw God revealed in history, and how they told their stories. In the light of these conclusions, the second part of the article examines several difficult Old Testament texts.

The concept of moral discernment is often used to describe the inspired decisionmaking of a conscientious Christian, but Pope Francis uses it relationally in terms of accompaniment and often enough, more broadly than an individual’s choice. Rather, he suggests that bishops and their local churches ought to morally discern how they should settle issues addressing contemporary pastoral challenges. This article argues that in its history, moral discernment was a social practice used in a variety of relational ways to determine a pathway for living out the summons of the gospel.

Evolution raises problems for some Christian beliefs, such as the character of God’s creating act, whether God intervenes in nature’s consistency, God’s purpose in the light of nature’s randomness, and whether we can refer to anything specific God does in history. This article addresses these issues first with some abstract conceptions of God, and then with considerations of the nature of God creating, the immanence and transcendence of God, and God’s “action” in the world. It concludes with reflections on the Christian life in the light of this theological construction.

Maurice Blondel’s philosophy makes strong claims about the theological enterprise. Namely, philosophy and theology achieve their fulfillment only in mutual dependence and both court superstition to the extent that they attempt self-sufficiency. This symbiotic relationship drives Blondel’s seminal work Action, which not only deduces a hypothetical necessity for the supernatural from a realist phenomenology but also establishes strictly philosophical exigencies with theological import: a true revelation in sensory signs, a historical Savior as Mediator, and a sacramental practice, a robust response to the Enlightenment critique of the Christian religion.

Looking at the relationship between theological, philosophical, and scientific methods within the thought of twentieth-century philosopher Josef Pieper, the author argues that Pieper’s perspective is that theology, philosophy, and science are limited in their ability to obtain knowledge because they are human methods of inquiry. However, theology and philosophy as conceived by Pieper welcome this restriction while modern mechanistic views of science deny it. This article focuses on the distinctive differences that Pieper sees between philosophy as an apophatic discipline and modern scientific methods. It concludes with a discussion on the relationship between philosophy and the virtue of hope.

There is no explicit authoritative Catholic teaching on gender reassignment surgery (GRS). Catholic bioethicists have debated the origin of gender dysphoria and the effectiveness of GRS. A further ethical question is whether some forms of GRS involve “mutilation in the strict sense.” The principle of totality does not apply to GRS as the reproductive organs are a cause of distress only because the object of distress. This analysis leaves open the status of GRS which does not compromise biological function.

This article responds to Pope Francis’s call in Laudato Si’ for an ecological expansion of mission and seeks to provide it with theological support. This support comes by way of a trinitarian rendition of the missiological concept missio Dei. Drawing from Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan’s accounts of the trinitarian missions, it articulates a theological ecology (as opposed to an ecological theology), in which the traditional doctrine of God is the controlling motif. Through the missions of the Son and Holy Spirit, God transforms the moral-intellectual-volitional comportment of humanity and recruits them into a shared mission of environmental concern.